1. Decision Making
Good decision making is an essential skill for personal & career success, and effective leadership.

3. Decision Making Decision Making is the act of making a choice.
Making responsible choices helps you achieve personal goals.
Your decisions determine your behavior

4. What Influences Your Decisions?
A variety of influences shape your decisions
External Influences:
Family, friends, and society
Internal Influences:
Your own knowledge and attitudes

5. Other Influences on Decision Making
Culture: your beliefs and customs
Values: your personal beliefs and ideas about what is important
Resources: people, time, money, skills, knowledge, and technology
Demographics: location, population
Media & Society

6. Needs vs. Wants
Need: something essential to your survival and well-being
Wants: something you desire, even though it is not essential
“Wants” have great power over your decision making skills.

7. Consider the consequences…
While many decisions you make only effect you, many more will also effect your family, friends, and community.
What are some examples of how decisions that you make effect others?

8. Decision Making
All of us have to make decisions every day. Some decisions are relatively straightforward and simple: What should I wear to school today? Others are quite complex: Do I want to have a part time job or join the football team?
Simple decisions usually need a simple decision-making process. But difficult decisions require a much more detail process.

9. Steps to Making a Decision
Step 1: Identify the problem.
Step 2: Brainstorm possible solutions.
Step 3: Explore and evaluate possible solutions
Step 4: Make a decision, plan and act on the decision.
Step 5: Evaluate results of the decision and accept responsibility for results of the decision. .
EVALUATE
ACT
EXPLORE
BRAINSTORM
IDENTIFY

10. The Six Thinking Hats The six thinking hats is a way to help
you make decisions by looking at
situations from other perspectives:
When a decision arrives, approach it wearing each of the following hats:
White: With this thinking hat, you focus on the data available
Red: Wearing the red hat, you look at the decision using intuition, gut reaction, and emotion
Blue: The Blue Hat stands for process control and focus
Green: The Green Hat stands for creativity
Black: When using black hat thinking, look at things pessimistically, cautiously and defensively.
Yellow: The yellow hat helps you to think positively
Adapted from

11. Learning from your decisions
Good decisions are choices you can be proud of.
Think through decisions you’ve made:
Are they realistic,
responsible, and
respectful for
everyone involved?